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Those who monitor false information and technical policies welcome this type of analysis. “New online security regulators and independent auditors should consider deploying technologies such as TrollMagnifier to evaluate existing security systems so that social media can take more responsibility for online harms,” said Max Beverton-Palmer, head of Tony’s Internet Policy Department. Blair Institute for Global Change. A Reddit spokesperson stated that their policy prohibits content manipulation, including coordinated false promotional activities and any content that is misleading or misattributed to individuals or entities. “We have a dedicated team that uses automated tools and manual reviews to detect and prevent this behavior on our platform,” the spokesperson said. “Due to the efforts of our team, we removed 99% of the content that violated the policy before users saw it.”
But Higgins and Yevgeniy Golovchenko of the University of Copenhagen, another researcher on disinformation, are cautious about the reproducibility of troll hunting methods in academia. Higgins said that some organic behaviors may look like trolls, pointing out errors in earlier, more basic academic research, and failing to accurately distinguish between unreal and true behaviors. “I am interested in delving into the resulting data to see how much of it is just community interactions, rather than actual state-approved trolls,” he said. What Golovchenko cares about is the result itself. “This is a very interesting topic, and the paper is ambitious, but I am not entirely sure how to evaluate the accuracy of the tools provided by the author,” he said. On the one hand, the tool is trained on the accounts that have been discovered-therefore, the worst-designed accounts may be just the tip of the iceberg of the disinformation capabilities supported by the state. “These accounts are meant not to be discovered,” Golovchenko said. “Research like this will always give us minimal design-through design, because we are talking about state actors that spend resources hidden.”
Others welcome this paper and its findings more. “The proof of any tool lies in its application. From the results here, these researchers have developed an ingenious method to expand the identification of accounts involved in coordinating troll activities,” said Ciaran O’Connor. Dialogue Institute, responsible for online monitoring of false information and extremism. However, O’Connor did point out that if there is no seed list of known accounts to view echoes, it is difficult to track such a situation-this may happen on Reddit, which publicly releases data to help researchers. “Transparency in social media platforms is an ongoing challenge. We will also argue that more data is always the answer to help us, and then help platforms help themselves by understanding and addressing emerging strategies, tools, and narratives favored by bad actors. Social media,” he said.
This transparency has helped researchers discover troll-like behavior-a kind deed that researchers hope they can give back to Reddit. “I think this technology will definitely help social networking companies,” Stringhini said. He pointed out that although they have more indicators to view and can provide hints about the real background of troll users, such as IP addresses and browser fingerprints, checking the pattern of content posting can help more accurately identify more unreal users. .
However, given the mundane nature of Reddit, it is still tricky to find unreal users. Bootinbull remained silent on the platform on December 3, 2015. 50 days after the first release, this inspiring mission did not seem to have succeeded – or it was over. Their farewell post? this: In response to the setting of a lengthy joke in r/jokes, a woman asked a man “Do you drink beer?” Bootinbull erroneously replied: “It’s just beer :)”.
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